Harry Dorsey Gough | |
|---|---|
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| Born | January 28, 1745 |
| Died | May 8, 1808 (aged 63) |
| Nationality | Colonial British & American |
| Occupation(s) | Merchant, planter, & real-estate developer |
| Political party | Federalist |
| Spouse | Prudence Carnan (m. 1771) |
| Children | Sophia Gough |
| Parent(s) | Thomas Gough Sophia Dorsey Gough |
Harry Dorsey Gough [2] (28 January 1745 – 8 May 1808) was a prominent 18th-century merchant, planter, and patron of the fledgling Methodist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, in the early United States.
Harry's father was the English merchant Thomas Gough, who emigrated to the United States prior to the outbreak of its Revolution against Britain. As his new home was near Patapsco Ferry and his new wife had extensive holdings in the colonies, Thomas would later side with the revolutionaries against the Crown. [3] Thomas had already married the American Sophia Dorsey, who bore him Harry on January 28, 1745, in Annapolis. [4]
In addition to his father's wealth, Harry inherited £70,000 at a young age and became a successful merchant. [5] The money came from his English half-brother John William Gough (1729–1767), by Thomas Gough's first wife Ann Brooksby. John's year-old son was subsequently brought to America and raised in Maryland. Confusingly, this nephew was also named Harry Dorsey Gough (1766–1807) and his son (1793–1867) would later also bear the same name.
The eldest Harry Dorsey Gough's estate eventually comprised 2,000 acres (810 ha) along the Great Gunpowder River northeast of Baltimore. [6] Much of this was Corbin Lee's 1,000-acre (400 ha) plantation [7] The Adventure, which Gough purchased for £5,000 in 1774 [6] from Archibald Buchanan [8] [9] after Corbin's death in 1773. [10] He renamed it Perry Hall in honor of his family's ancestral home in Staffordshire and completed construction of its 16-room manor in 1776. [11] Many years later, modern Baltimore's Bel Air Road (U.S. Route 1) was known as "Gough's Road" or "Perry Hall Road". [5]
In 1771, the 26-year-old Gough married the 18-year-old Prudence Carnan, sister of future governor Charles Ridgely. While her husband held raucous parties, she followed the lead of her aunt Rebecca Dorsey Ridgely [12] in befriending Bishop Francis Asbury, the "Father of American Methodism". In 1775, Gough attended a Methodist camp meeting in Baltimore with his friends for the purpose of mocking the attendees; instead, he found himself moved and contemplating the meaning of his life and even suicide. [13] He subsequently joined his wife in supporting them, [4] [14] befriending Asbury in March 1776 and building first a cabin and then the Camp Meeting Chapel [15] [16] off Perry Hall's eastern wing. [5] Perry Hall was also where Asbury and Thomas Coke planned the Christmas Conference which established American Methodism in 1784. [14]
During the American Revolution, Gough was a Nonjuror who declined to swear the oath of allegiance to the rebel government. [17] As such, he was excluded from political office and even indicted in October 1778 for illegal preaching at his house chapel. [18] (Many of the early Methodist exhorters returned to England during the Revolution and those who didn't, such as Asbury, were often suspected of Loyalist sympathies. Swearing the oath of allegiance was a necessary condition of leading a lawful religious assembly.)
After the Revolution, Gough swore the oath of allegiance and again became active in politics, philanthropy, and experimental farming. He was a member of the Federalist Party in the fledgling United States. He had already helped with Maryland's first Alms House in 1773; [4] in 1806, he helped manage St. Peter's School, a Baltimore orphanage. [4] He set about improving the livestock on his farm with European imports after the end of hostilities; in 1786, he was elected as the first president of the Society for the Encouragement and Improvement of Agriculture in Maryland [19] and he may have been the first to import shorthorn bulls to America. [20]
In this early period, Gough was one of the largest owners of slaves in Maryland, with around 70. [21] Gough credited his own conversion to the touching sermon of thanksgiving he found being preached to his slaves by an African Methodist from a neighboring plantation. [13] He subsequently took the abolitionist teachings of Wesley and the English Methodists to heart enough that he discontinued lifetime servitude on his lands, forming contracts with his slaves promising them freedom after a term of years (a "term slavery" similar to the earlier English indentured servants). Seeing "the injustice of detaining my fellow Creatures, in Slavery and Bondage", forty-five were manumitted in April 1780. [21] His ties to Methodism and relatively generous treatment of these slaves have caused some to link Gough to "Black Harry" Hosier's otherwise unknown Baltimore master; a connection to the Goughs would also explain Hosier's close relationship with Bishop Asbury. Gough could nevertheless prove furious and merciless to runaways leaving before the end of their term: he offered $40 for the return of the runaway Will Bates, whom he called "a very ungrateful young rogue" and "an atrocious Ingrate" [22] [23] to make an example of him before his other term laborers. By 1804, Gough and other planters had passed legislation allowing them to increase the terms of their indentured servants' contracts in the event of runaways. [24]
Gough's funeral was attended by over 2,000 mourners and presided over by Bishop Asbury. His estate was estimated to be worth $300,000 (~$8.67 million in 2023) [12] and still included 51 enslaved laborers. [21] His wife succeeded him by 14 years, dying on 23 June 1822. [5] His only child was his daughter Sophia, who married James Mackubin or Maccubin. Mackubin later changed his name to Carroll as part of an inheritance [15] and served as the executor of his father-in-law's estate. The related papers are maintained by the Maryland Historical Society. [25]
Francis Asbury was a British-American Methodist minister who became one of the first two bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. During his 45 years in the colonies and the newly independent United States, he devoted his life to ministry, traveling on horseback and by carriage thousands of miles to those living on the frontier.
The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was the oldest and largest Methodist denomination in the United States from its founding in 1784 until 1939. It was also the first religious denomination in the US to organize itself nationally. In 1939, the MEC reunited with two breakaway Methodist denominations to form the Methodist Church. In 1968, the Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form the United Methodist Church.
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Peter Cartwright,, also known as "Uncle Peter", "Backwoods Preacher", "Lord's Plowman", "Lord's Breaking-Plow", and "The Kentucky Boy", was an American Methodist, revivalist, preacher, in the Midwest, as well as twice an elected legislator in Illinois. Cartwright, a Methodist missionary, helped start America's Second Great Awakening, personally baptizing twelve thousand converts. Opposed to slavery, Cartwright moved from Kentucky to Illinois, and was elected to the lower house of the Illinois General Assembly in 1828 and 1832. In 1846 Abraham Lincoln defeated Cartwright for a seat in the United States Congress. As a Methodist circuit rider, Cartwright rode circuits in Kentucky and Illinois, as well as Tennessee, Indiana and Ohio. His Autobiography (1856) made him nationally prominent.
Samuel Green was a slave, freedman, and minister of religion. A conductor of the Underground Railroad, he was tried and convicted in 1857 of possessing a copy of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe following the Dover Eight incident. He received a ten-year sentence, and was pardoned by the Governor of Maryland Augustus Bradford in 1862, after he served five years.
Robert Carter III was an American planter and politician from the Northern Neck of Virginia. During the colonial period, he sat on the Virginia Governor's Council for roughly two decades. After the American Revolutionary War saw the Thirteen Colonies gain independence from the British Empire as the United States, Carter, influenced by his belief in Baptism, began the largest manumission in the history of the United States prior to the American Civil War.
The Christmas Conference was an historic founding conference of the newly independent Methodists within the United States held just after the American Revolution at Lovely Lane Chapel in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1784.
The Shorthorn breed of cattle originated in the North East of England in the late eighteenth century. The breed was developed as dual-purpose, suitable for both dairy and beef production; however, certain blood lines within the breed always emphasised one quality or the other. Over time, these different lines diverged, and by the second half of the twentieth century, two separate breeds had developed – the Beef Shorthorn, and the Milking Shorthorn. All Shorthorn cattle are coloured red, white, or roan, although roan cattle are preferred by some, and completely white animals are not common. However, one type of Shorthorn has been bred to be consistently white – the Whitebred Shorthorn, which was developed to cross with black Galloway cattle to produce a popular blue roan crossbreed, the Blue Grey.
Daniel Alexander Payne was an American bishop, educator, college administrator and author. A major shaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), Payne stressed education and preparation of ministers and introduced more order in the church, becoming its sixth bishop and serving for more than four decades (1852–1893) as well as becoming one of the founders of Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856. In 1863, the AME Church bought the college and chose Payne to lead it; he became the first African-American president of a college in the United States and served in that position until 1877.
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Harry Gough may refer to:
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